In a telephone environment, situations can exist in which a voice response system may be unable to provide an appropriate automatic response during a user call. Examples of such situations include failure of speech recognition software or a user asking a question to which the system is not programmed to respond. In such situations, the user call is typically forwarded to a human operator, who must personally deal with the user's inquiry. Being routed to an operator can be frustrating and inconvenient for the user, particularly where the operator asks the user to start over from the beginning of the inquiry. Having to make a suitable number of human operators available to avoid high levels of customer dissatisfaction also increases the service provider's costs.
Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2002-140243 discloses an automated voice response system in which each user inquiry is recorded. If speech recognition fails during a session, an e-mail message with the user recording is transmitted to a selected small office/home office (SOHO) operator, who transcribes the recording to a text file that is transmitted back to the voice response system for continuing the service. It may take a significant amount of time to complete these actions, making the approach inconvenient for the user and inefficient from the service provider's point of view.
There have been developed a variety of other systems and methods for assisting an operator when a call from a user is forwarded or a user wants to talk to the operator. For example, Japanese Published Patent Application No. 8-76965 discloses a system in which a user who is having trouble using the system can be connected to an operator who can support the user. Japanese Published Patent Application No. 10-322450 discloses a high-accuracy speech recognition system that can reduce operational burdens on operators. Moreover, Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2002-202882 discloses a system capable of automatically controlling the timing of the intervention of an operator depending on the knowledge level of a user. Additionally, Japanese Published Patent Application No. 11-231891 discloses a system that is capable of displaying text produced by conversion based on speech recognition, according to a system reliability level indicating the degree of accuracy of the conversion.
Conventionally, in an automated voice response system used for the operation of call centers, callers interact with the system in a “question-and-answer” format, as shown in Session Example 1 below.